


it just takes some time

by WalkingInland



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, I truly have no idea, Idk what this is really, MY WORLD FOR A COHERANT TIMELINE, Oh! and jamie is also here, Pre-Canon, Season 1, Season 2, Stream of Consciousness, What else is new, and here we are, and his love, blame dg, but it's a nice shoulder, i mean it's vague, is this what they call a character study?, it grew up in my phone's notes app, just thinkin about claire, mostly - Freeform, oh also if the years make no sense, or really it's just his shoulder, plz, this is Very Tiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:53:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28518207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WalkingInland/pseuds/WalkingInland
Summary: Claire has never led a steady life. Striving for blue vases and walking through battlefields.Just a wee look at our dear Sassenach's journey ❤
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Comments: 18
Kudos: 43





	it just takes some time

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Audrey Assad's "The Middle"

She is five years old when she learns that life is not guaranteed. Stability is not a promised existence, and parents don't always come home. She is five years old when a car flips upside down and upturns her life. 

She is eighteen years old when she finds love. This is not her first time finding it, nor is it her last. She is eighteen years old, and and she doesn't know that love is a storm. Sometimes it is a gentle summer shower, surprising and sweet and gone so soon, but always leaving a smile when you think of it.

Sometimes it sweeps you up in joy and chaos and the sheer energy of being alive in the midst of a world falling to pieces.

Sometimes you see it coming a long way off, and yet it still takes you off guard in the way that it was always there. It overtakes you no matter how hard you resist. You run from it, but when you are enveloped in it you find a peace in rest, and wonder why you ever would run from this power, held in check or released.

Sometimes a storm is frigid and icicle shaped. It feels eternal. Never-ending. Dark. There is calm and chaos and fear and acceptance in these storms. It can be beautiful and peaceful and quiet while the world slips by around you. You forget yourself in these storms.

Sometimes though, you turn your face away from the cold flowing around you. You turn your face to the spring, to the rain pouring down in awakening sheets through the sun. Sometimes life comes growing above you around you _bursting_ from the ground. Sometimes the storm surprises you in its joy. And you find that love is a storm that is steady and as life giving as the rain. 

But she does not know all this quite yet. That knowledge will come. But not yet.

Right now she is eighteen and running to a chapel on the brink of a world war, exchanging rings as anchors before the world is upturned again. Not only hers this time.

She is nineteen the first time a man dies in front of her. This will not be the last time.

She is twenty-six when war ends and quiet comes and she comes face to face with a life she does not know anymore. 

Battlefields and blue vases have a hard time sharing a home.

She is twenty-seven when the world stands still and it is her turn to be upheaved. 

She is twenty-seven when she is one of the disappeared, when the life she thought she would lead snaps out of existence as surely and swiftly as the shoulder of a young soldier that she snaps into place.

She is twenty-seven, and twenty-eight. Twenty-nine and thirty and fifty. She is young and growing older. She meets love again, in the most unlikely places. She grows children and homes and _life_ , no matter that it's a different sort of life than she thought she was planting. 

Storms are surprising like that, sometimes.

They say that stones are solid, immovable. People build homes and beliefs and futures on rock, a foundation to live through time. They build and build and do not know what lies beneath those stones.

_She_ knows that stones are not so solid as people think. And yet.... And yet nonetheless. She chooses to build her life on them. 

After all. Life is not so guaranteed. She has been learning that since she was five years old. 

And so maybe stones are not such a good foundation. But love? Yes. She knows that love has made for her the surest foundation in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!!! I truly appreciate it ❤❤❤


End file.
